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Don't Sweat Health Care, California's Got This

Implementing Obamacare is a train wreck nationally, but in California it's a high-speed rail disaster.

In the past few weeks we learned that health insurance giants UnitedHealth, Cigna and Aetna will opt out of California's health care exchanges. They will still provide health insurance through large employers but wisely avoided Obamacare’s complicated new framework.

In another hit to the left coast, many Californians need to trade in their Cadillac plan for a backfiring Yugo. State leaders claim that more people will be insured, but benefits will be cut and the network of providers reduced.

More recently it was revealed that the "Affordable" Care Act will drastically increase the insurance premiums of millions of Californians. Young residents who buy insurance for themselves will see their already high insurance premiums double.

When politicians see their good intentions collapse into a swamp of red tape, you’d think they might consider a course correction. But instead of learning from their mistakes, state leaders are screaming, “go faster!”

Since Obamacare mandates that businesses give expensive new benefits to full-time employees, many companies simply converted many of their positions to part-time. Everyone with an ounce of common sense predicted this move, yet it came as quite the shock to Sacramento.

But have no fear — the Golden State's "regulate first, ask questions later" lawmakers have created a cunning plan to teach those businesses a lesson. The legislature is working on a bill that would levy a fine of up to $6,000 on employers for every full-time employee that ends up on the state’s version of Medicaid.

Sonya Schwartz, program director at the National Academy for State Health Policy (yeah, that’s a thing) says, “There are concerns that employers will be gaming this new system and taking less and less responsibility for their workers. This may make employers think twice.”

That’ll show ‘em! But, hold on a second. Like the original Obamacare language, this new law only applies to full-time employees. You know, the positions businesses have already converted into part-time slots. So this exciting new bill just repeats the same counterproductive penalties Obamacare created in the first place.

For years, Wal-Mart—and other large retail operators—have been piling up huge profits by controlling their labor costs through paying employees sub-poverty level wages. As a result, it has long been left to the taxpayer to provide healthcare and other subsidized benefits to the many Wal-Mart employees who are dependent on Medicaid, food stamp programs and subsidized housing in order to keep their families from going under.

With Medicaid eligibility about to be expanded in some 30 states, as a result of the Affordable Care Act, Wal-Mart has responded by cutting employee hours—and thereby wages—even further in order to push more of their workers into state Medicaid programs and increase Wal-Mart profits. Good news for Wal-Mart shareholders and senior management earning the big bucks—not so good for the taxpayers who will now be expected to contribute even larger amounts of money to subsidize Wal-Mart’s burgeoning profits.

Burgeoning profits! Cutting hours! Sub-poverty wages! Despite the overwrought jargon, the California bill only exacerbates the problem it claims to fix. When government punishes job creators, fewer jobs are created. When government attacks profit makers, fewer employees get paid. And when lawmakers actually do land an anti-business punch, the costs are passed to you and me, the consumer.

Sacramento boasts of their trendsetting policies with the line, “first California, then the nation.” Let’s pray that this high speed train wreck goes off the rails before it leaves the Golden State.

I know of 2 states in the USA with economy's large enough to be country's in their own right and would be in the G20 if they were independant. One is fixated on dependance and Government Interfearance and the other vearmently indpendant. Guess which one I'm backing to come out of this o.k choosing from Texas and California?

ObamaCare’s risk corridor program faces a $2.5 billion shortfall, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, due to insurance companies paying out a greater number of claims than anticipated. As Congress approaches the deadline to pass an omnibus bill to fund the federal government, FreedomWorks strongly urges Congress to include language to prevent the Obama administration from using any taxpayer dollars to bailout insurance companies that participate in the ObamaCare exchanges.

In a perverse misunderstanding of cause and effect, government regulators always seem to respond to their failures by calling for more of the same. If a policy fails to produce the desired effect, it must be because it didn’t go far enough. Education spending a failure? Spend more! Centralized health care costing too much? Centralize further! The ability to admit a mistake and reverse a bad policy seems to be one that government employees do not possess.

Ever since Republicans took the majority in the Senate, the use of budget reconciliation to put a repeal of ObamaCare on the president’s desk has been a juicy apple hanging just out of reach. A budget reconciliation bill, unlike an ordinary bill, only requires 51 votes to pass, meaning a simple majority of Republicans should theoretically be able to pass it without going to Democrats for help.

Advocates of government intervention in markets usually frame the debate as a binary choice: “We need government to run things so the evil corporations don’t!” It’s an effective tactic, because most people have an inherent distrust of big business, and like the idea of a less money-grubbing alternative. Most of the time, Republicans they foolishly play into the narrative, arguing that given the choice between corporate masters or government ones, we should choose the former. Unsurprisingly, few people are convinced by this, and they shouldn’t be. The whole debate is based on a false dilemma that doesn’t exist. The discussion should not be about choosing our rulers, it should be about choosing whether to be ruled in the first place. As the 19th century individualist Lysander Spooner said, “a man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.”

Following the news the UnitedHealth Group, the largest insurance company in the United States, is scaling back its ObamaCare marketing and considering withdrawing from the exchanges, FreedomWorks CEO Adam Brandon commented:

The irreparable structural flaws of ObamaCare are being revealed at a frightening pace. 12 of the state insurance co-ops have failed, insurance premiums just keep rising, enrollment is predicted to be flat, the majority of newly insured Americans have actually just been shoved into Medicaid, and the insurance companies are asking for billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts to forestall even steeper price hikes. ObamaCare is dismantling and destabilizing the entire infrastructure of our health care system, and it’s hurting real people.

The House of Representatives’ ObamaCare reconciliation bill doesn’t go far enough. The Senate now has the opportunity to improve upon it by sending legislation that fully repeals ObamaCare to the president’s desk. Unfortunately, some Senate Republicans are content to go along with the House’s timid piecemeal approach.

Last week, I wrote about how insurance companies are receiving only a fraction of the money they asked for to compensate them for losses under the Affordable Care Act, and how this was a consequence of structural weaknesses in the design of the law. Now, analysts from ratings firm Standard and Poor's are saying that the risk corridor fund charged with providing this money is nearly exhausted, and that congressional action will likely be required to refill it sometime next year.